W.E.B. Du Bois: “It was an unfortunate circumstance, that it was the disposition of religious sects to imagine they understood the rights…”

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it.

Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine.

Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.

Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a…